The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August, 2025 (the text here includes a few additions) THE SUBTITLE of Fierce Desires announces an ambitious agenda: “A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” hinting at a challenge to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s influential book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, first published in 1988…
The Gay and Lesbian Review, Jan-Feb., 2025 Stories about the decline of the gay bar had led Amin Ghaziani to expect his sabbatical in London in 2018 to be a dull affair. He was surprised to discover that queer nightlife was more lively, and more nuanced, than the drastic headlines would suggest. The big city…
Here’s a draft of my paper on the Israeli constitutionalism conundrum. It’s still a work in progress: I welcome feedback. (For the latest draft, please contact me.) The presentation may serve as a friendlier introduction to my main arguments and findings. It also includes a detailed discussion of developments in law and government. Although my…
My presentation (PDF) at the Socio-legal Studies Association conference, the University of Ulster, April 2023.
The Netanyahu-Trump meeting on Friday at Mar-a-Lago will be the low-pressure encounter of the like-minded who share political interests and personal circumstances. The family resemblance is uncanny: Opposition to incumbent Democrats in the White House; strong in words, weak in deeds; repeatedly persecuted for corruption; politics as a family business. It is easy to add…
BORN THIS WAYScience, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movementby Joanna WuestUniv. of Chicago. 293 pages, $32.50 The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August 2024 LGBT activism has a longstanding relationship with the illiberal notion of being “Born This Way” (as gay, lesbian, etc.)—illiberal, because it argues that the sexualities behind the queer alphabet soup are…
Following the death of the great Daniel Kahneman. In 2010 I reached out to Daniel Kahneman — my only personal interaction with him — for his opinion on the peculiar macro-scale demonstration of the Conjunction Fallacy (or CF, sometimes also known as the Linda Problem), which I noticed to have taken place in Israel in…
Just a few passing thoughts: Victory is an empty word There is not, and never was, a concept of “victory” to guide Israeli leadership. It is quite clear what a “victory” in war means, and how a war may end (consider WWI or WWII). But what could the picture of victory for this state-against-militia situation…
I explain the meaning of the expression “officer of the U.S.” that seems to baffle American judges and law professors
Will miracles never cease? Finally there’s political unity in Israel. The first bill in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul package — that which would curb the Supreme Court’s ability to examine a law based on its reasonableness — passed unanimously. Of course, nothing in Israeli politics is unanimous, or at least not since February 16,…
A recent piece in The Economist prompted me to articulate my thoughts on the dynamics of culture. You can read my letter to the newspaper below. The Economist lamented the grade inflation in today’s book reviews, compared with a prewar golden age when critics gleefully employed sharper pens. Today, says the newspaper, book reviews are…
Constitution Needed: When Israel’s founding leaders declared independence in 1948, they promised to govern through a constitution. That vow remains unfulfilled to this day. The Forward, 2012
Each of us gets to decide whether to follow the rules or change them. In Hebrew we call this ‘combina,’ a slang word referring to the bypassing of rules or commitments. Haaretz, October 15, 2010 A historic event passed almost unnoticed on Sunday. A group of some 200 intellectuals and other public figures gathered in…
The LGBT Center’s Town Hall: A Jerusalem Take, Gay City News, March 31, 2011 At the end of the two-hour town hall meeting at the LGBT Community Center, nobody looked particularly content. No party was recognized as victorious; little news awaited breaking; no obvious sound bites emerged to shape future discourse. After two time extensions,…
The Jerusalem Post, July 15, 2017 When a strong majority of Americans support LGBT equality, it takes a lot for a pride parade in any American city to cause a controversy, but the Chicago Dyke March, now in its 21st year, did exactly that in June. And it isn’t even the city’s official pride parade,…
It’s Love versus Sex in White’s Latest The Gay and Lesbian Review, May-June 2012 Jack Holmes and His Friend: A Novel by Edmund White Bloomsbury. 400 pages, $26. TRUST EDMUND WHITE not to shy away from sex. Now, in his latest novel Jack Holmes and his Friend, the master of the queer eye directs…
The following exercise is intended for night owls having a hard time waking up in the morning: Imagine a scenario to get you out of bed. Perhaps something of the kind was attempted by Kafka in several of his best known works. I bring it up not because I mean it as a textual interpretation….
What Was Forster Thinking? The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-Aug. 2015 “ARCTIC SUMMER,” the title of an unfinished novel by E. M. Forster, well suits this fictional biography of the English writer. It’s hard to imagine a writer further away from the romantic image of the struggling, mercurial artist. Forster was born in 1879 and…
The Gay and Lesbian Review, May-June, 2015 The bisexual’s dilemma Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles Blow Houghton Mifflin. 240 pages, $27. The American Dream is not one but rather a kaleidoscope of dreams; this is the rural Southern version. Charles Blow’s life to date can be comfortably divided into two roughly equal…
Legally Male The Gay and Lesbian Review, March-April 2015 MASCULINITY is a flexible enough concept, and America is a large enough country, that the essays in this collection cannot be reduced to a single dimension or formula. American Guy, edited by Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum, grew out of an academic conference of the law…
Homo Politicus The Gay and Lesbian Review, Sep.- Oct. 2015 Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage by Barney Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux 400 pages, $28. GAY, JEWISH, and left-handed, Barney Frank likes to say that he’s a natural advocate for minorities. At the same time, had he not been…
What Makes an Economist Great? The Gay and Lesbian Review, Nov.-Dec. 2015 Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes by Richard Davenport-Hines Basic Books, 432 pages, $29.99 JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES would not make a great Hollywood protagonist, at least based on Richard Davenport-Hines’ biography. It’s hard to identify a breakthrough moment, any dramatic shift,…
Deus Sex Machina
Yanagihara’s best-seller defies expectations in a wholly expected way.
Review of Male Sex Work and Society Edited by Victor Minichiello and John Scott Harrington Park Press. 512 pages, $50. The Gay and Lesbian Review, Jan.-Feb., 2015 ANY BOOK about male prostitution is bound to call to mind the classic 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, in which Joe Buck, a dishwasher-cum-gigolo from Texas played by Jon…
What the famous historian Saul Friedländer gets right (and wrong) about Kafka.
The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August, 2013 The freedom fighters’ historian The Martin Duberman Reader: The Essential Historical, Biographical, and Autobiographical Writings New Press. 384 pages, $21.95 THIS COMPENDIUM of Martin Duberman’s published writings has funneled into a single volume samples from an oeuvre that includes some twenty books and numerous essays written over a…
How Schulman unwittingly undermines her own argument.
Strange Man in a Strange Land The Gay & Lesbian Review, Sep.-Oct. 2013 Review of Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America by Roy Morris Jr. Belknap Press. 264 pages, $26.95 THE TITLE of Declaring His Genius refers to Oscar Wilde’s notorious remark upon landing in New York in 1882 (“I have nothing to…
תקציב הפרסום הגאה של עיריית תל-אביב וגלגוליה של טעות תרגום העין השביעית, 30 בינואר 2012 נניח שאתם העורכים של עיתון ישראלי הצריכים להעריך את התקציב של מסע פרסום במימון ציבורי להאדרת שמה של תל-אביב כמעוז הומואי מצטיין. בלי להציץ, מהי לדעתכם עלותו הכוללת של הקמפיין? עכשיו מותר להציץ. ב-21 בפברואר 2011 פירסם ynet ידיעה שעניינה…
Gay City News, December 7, 2011 The New York Times recently dedicated precious space to the follies of Israel’s public relations. I’m not talking about Sarah Schulman’s “Israel and Pinkwashing,” which alleges that the Israeli government effectively leverages the gains of the LGBT community to have its way with the Palestinians, but rather a Times…
The venomous disregard for the truth makes Spanish criticism of Israel banal and misses important issues. This simplistic anti-Israel narrative represents not a noble struggle for human rights, but rather a contamination of both journalism and the great democracy that the newspaper serves. (Read on the Haaretz website) Haaretz, April 3, 2009 Imagine that Spanish…